(no subject)

[theweaselking]

South Carolina crazy person cruelly kills a harmless family pet because her crazy is considered socially unremarkable and went unaddressed until AFTER she tortured a helpless puppy to death for offending her.

Comments

[ashbet]

Frankly, I'd like to see *her* hung and set on fire. Crazy fucking bitch. Let's hope the judge/jury/prosecutor don't get swayed by the OMGRELIGION defense :/

-- A :(

This will be interesting

[disgruntledgrrl.livejournal.com]

Because the dog is a pit bull.
This is similar to a white sheriff plugging a black teen because "they were gonna do something if they hadn't already".

If the religious sects throw their weight behind the pit bull bans - I might have to go underground.

Re: This will be interesting

[missysedai.livejournal.com]

The anti-pittie people piss me the fuck off. Largely because they wouldn't know a pittie if he walked up and drooled all over their shoes. (Which is pretty much all a well-trained and well-loved pittie will do to a person.)

Re: This will be interesting

[ben-raccoon.livejournal.com]

That's after it slobbers their face off, of course.

Re: This will be interesting

[missysedai.livejournal.com]

And roots through their pockets to see if there might be cheese in 'em!

(Of course, that might just be my dog, but I doubt it.)

[missysedai.livejournal.com]

I am SCREAMING in rage and frustration. Flaying is too good for this piece of shit.

[whisperkit.livejournal.com]

She doesn't seem mentally ill to me. Just religious.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The two are one and the same. She believes GOD TALKS TO HER AND GUIDES HER ACTIONS - this is EXACTLY the same as believing that the tooth fairy or the Space Werewolf or the ghosts of her unborn children talk to her, it's just socially acceptable because it's an unoriginal kind of crazy.

Besides, read the article again. She says, outright, that she hears voices telling her to kill. She's just "religious, not crazy"[1] because it's GOD's voice she hears.

[1]: A meaningless non-distinction.

[whisperkit.livejournal.com]

I disagree, and resent the implication that my disability lumps me in with the religious right. Religion is a sign of stupidity and lack of thought, not mental illness.

That said, hearing voices makes a change, and I'll happily say there's a high chance she has schizophrenia or something. So let's all get together in a cheering round of 'burn the cripple crazy over a fire'.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I don't recall anyone saying all mental illnesses were the same, merely that religion is one.

And if society correctly diagnosed it and treated it as one, she would have gotten help and treatment BEFORE "God" told her to torture an animal.

[whisperkit.livejournal.com]

"The two are one and the same."

Not going to go much further because it's basically a semantic point, but one that affects a sizable chunk of the disabled population, and ends up with a lot of 'WHY DON'T WE LOCK UP THE CRAZIES?!?!?!' whenever a right-winger does something stupid.

[snakey.livejournal.com]

I've been linking people to this article lately (awesome series).

[moiread]

Ah, crap. I just became one of those people who uses something offensively and, when confronted with that fact, wants to defend it because it's colloquial. And since I'm one of the people to whom it applies and I don't mind it being used by the world as a casual insult that means 'ridiculous and offensive and inexplicable', it shouldn't be a problem. Right? RIGHT?

Sigh. Time to go look at that.

[snakey.livejournal.com]

I had the same reaction to some of the posts in that series. Sigh. :(

[goblinpaladin.livejournal.com]

This irritates me. Crazy is crazy.

And I get to say that, and get irritated by it, because I *am* crazy, and have been diagnosed as such since 2003.

[snakey.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, some trans* people don't find the word "tranny" problematic, but that doesn't mean that cis people can throw the term around to insult people they don't like.

[cosmiccat.livejournal.com]

No.

Religion is a choice. Mental illness is not a choice; it is an affliction. There is no faith involved when the voice of God is a physical reality for you, and he is shouting commands in your ear.

The fact that some people believe it's possible to hear God does get in the way of diagnosing actual mental disease, but it's no more maladaptive than anything on the Wikipedia Common Misconceptions page. Some people might also believe that lift is generated by the different speeds of the air going over a wing, but I wouldn't refer them to a psychiatrist for that.

TL;DR:
Merely being wrong is not a mental illness.

OR

Calling this woman crazy is an insult to the genuinely crazy.

[snakey.livejournal.com]

Calling this woman crazy is an insult to the genuinely crazy.

Unless she *does* actually have a mental illness, which seems possible if she *is* literally hearing a voice - in which case it's a separate issue from "religious people are crazy because they're religious".

[cosmiccat.livejournal.com]

True, in that case it's just her personal crazy forming her psychotic delusions out of the trappings of her life.

[moiread]

Yes, thank you. "Religion is a choice" is the cornerstone of the "we get to judge you for it" position. Unlike, notably, race or gender or sexual orientation, etc, etc. I wind up yelling about this every time someone tries to slip religion in there.

(Of course, this doesn't apply to people for whom their religion was not actually a choice, in that they had the misfortune of being born into a very isolated religious community where they are essentially brainwashed from birth with no real opportunity to learn anything but what they're told, and they are coerced with threats and violence and abuse if they do not comply. Thankfully those circumstances do not apply to the majority of people in North America. And I do a whole other kind of yelling about the situation with the minority for whom it is the case, because aaaaah. But I digress.)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

She hears *voices* that *tell her to kill dogs*.

She is crazy.

She got a pass to this point because the voices in her head are "God", and religion (which is, by definition, antirational and non-sane) gets a pass - warning signs of dangerous insanity (such as believing in magic, believing that external forces are guiding you, hearing voices, believing that prayer works, believing that fairies will punish you for having unclean sex, etc) are ignored when religion is claimed.

[snakey.livejournal.com]

Why on earth do you think that people who believe *because they have a mental illness* that external forces are guiding them etc etc are likely to be *dangerously* "insane"? Leaving aside anything to do with views on religion, please stop buying into and promoting the idea that people with mental illnesses are *dangerous*. We are far, far more likely to be the *victims* of violence - at the hands of people *without* mental illnesses, most often - than the perpetrators of it. None of those are automatically "warning signs of dangerous insanity". (No, not even "hearing voices" - there are a great many people who live with forms of mental illness that cause them to "hear voices" who are categorically NOT "dangerously insane".)

Pronounce on religion all you want, but please educate yourself better on mental illness/disability before making pronouncements like this.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I think we've got a definition crosswire with the word "dangerous". I was not using it to mean that the people were necessarily dangerous, but rather that these beliefs were a "danger sign" or a "a symptom of a more fundamental problem" - it was a poor choice of words.

Substitute "serious"?

[torrain.livejournal.com]

She got a pass to this point because the voices in her head are "God", and religion (which is, by definition, antirational and non-sane) gets a pass - warning signs of serious insanity (such as believing in magic, believing that external forces are guiding you, hearing voices, believing that prayer works, believing that fairies will punish you for having unclean sex, etc) are ignored when religion is claimed.

No. You're conflating ignorance or cultural upbringing with insanity.
(Also all your examples of "serious" insanity are what I think are schizophrenic or psychotic symptoms, which I find rather glosses over all us people with mood disorders. Which is a side point, yes, but one I thought worth noting.)
Also learned non-helpful or non-rational behaviours or habits are not the same as mental illness--I'm not saying they are mutually entirely exclusive, but it's not a perfect Venn diagram overlap, and to say that all examples of the former qualify as the latter strikes me as simplistic.
Also the idea that her behaviour did "get a pass" because of religious trappings is not substantiated, since there is nothing to indicate that any symptoms of mental illness she was displaying were both recognized and accepted before that. It's not as if everyone displaying warning signs is (A) ignored or (B) helped-or-institutionalized and therefore there needs to be a specific reason the hypothesized earlier behaviours went into slot A rather than slot B.

So even if you substitute "serious" for "dangerous", that quote is coming across very much as a way for you to advance the viewpoint that religion can be discussed exclusively as mental illness. This is overly simplistic and sloppy.

[snakey.livejournal.com]

"Fucked in the head." "Broken." Classy language for PWDs there, dude.

Also, if you think it's that easy to "get help" when you have signs of a mental illness, then all I can say is AHAHAHAHAHAHAH *wipes away tear*.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

[rgovrebo.livejournal.com]

Religion has never been a choice for me.

[snakey.livejournal.com]

What cosmiccat said.

Also, exactly what "treatment" are you proposing for religious people? Is there something that someone has found effective somewhere? Can you cite studies?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Depends on what form their religion takes.

Some religion, like this lady's voices that tell her to kill dogs, are signs of a different illness that she's gone untreated for because she says it's Jesus.

Other forms are less directly harmful, but the point is to stop treating it as if it was a legitimate difference in opinion and not a warning sign of a crippling inability to think rationally in at least *some* ways. The correct response to "I believe in God" is "you poor dear, how can I help you get better", not "well, that excuses a whole rnage of things you might do."

[snakey.livejournal.com]

Did you *really* just use the word "crippling"? Ugh, dude.

Even if you think that religion is a mental illness (and you still haven't actually discussed what treatment might be effective) the response to signs of mental illness should never be "you poor dear". Fuck that patronising ablist bullshit.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

"You poor dear" is, absolutely, condescending. It's intended to be, in the exact same way I say "aww, muffin" when Christians claim they're being oppressed when they're stopped from killing non-Christians.

And what I said was that religion was a SYMPTOM of cognitive failure, and that treating it required that you diagnose further and figure out WHY the cognitive failure was happening. After all, some people really DO hear "the voice of their dog" and need to be treated for that, versus the number of people who think MuhammedPBUH, Joseph Smith, L Ron Hubbard, Prophet Yahweh, Joe Arpaio, and Snooki have a hotline to Heaven and their main problem is an inability to think.

[snakey.livejournal.com]

...wait. Admittedly I have now had beer, wine and port so this may not be coherent (in which cases apologies). But if you think that religion is a mental illness, and then you apply "the exact same" deliberately condescending words to someone you say has a mental illness to "Christians (who) claim they're being oppressed when they're stopped from killing non-Christians", then you really seem to be equating people with mental illnesses with BAW I AM SO OPPRESSED majority members?!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I think the religion is prima facie evidence of "incompetence", which I previously (in this post) equated with "mental illness". Cogent arguments have been presented that "mental illness" and "crazy" have special meaning beyond the literal meaning of the words, and that I have been Doing It Wrong.

I said that "you poor dear" was the most correct response to "I believe in God", and you said this was patronising. I agreed, it IS condescending, but I feel that this condescension is the most proper response to the people who choose that particular failure mode.

you really seem to be equating people with mental illnesses with BAW I AM SO OPPRESSED majority members?!

"All apples are fruits"
"Oranges are ALSO fruits"
"And?"
"You're accusing ORANGES of being APPLES!"

[kafziel.livejournal.com]

You seem to have some fructaphobia going on. Why is that?

cosigned by crazy

[snakey.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[ardys-the-ghoul.livejournal.com]

If this woman truly is mentally ill, I think she needs help rather than condemnation--although, I have to say, I think there should be a special place in Hell for people who kill puppies (whatever your conception of "Hell" happens to be).

I prefer not to judge people for being religious, because not all people who consider themselves "religious" do bad things; some of them do good things. Yes, terrible things have been done in the name of religion, but that's nothing new.

And not all "religious" people think God talks to them, because, hell, "If there really is a God, what makes you think he wants to talk to you?" (<--Someone else's words, not mine.)

So, anyone who thinks God is talking to them is most likely mentally ill, and they need to get help before they do something to hurt themselves or someone else (or an innocent, small fuzzy animal). And if they can't get help for themselves, then family or friends need to do it for them.

Of course, I have to state the obvious: it's possible she may have simply killed the dog out of anger for damaging her property and merely be claiming insanity to get out of it, in which case, she is an evil, evil lady and they need to lock her up and throw away the key.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I think she's definitely mentally ill, and she needs both help AND condemnation, if her mental illness hadn't been neglected in advance the puppy would still be alive, and her neighbours are just lucky she first snapped on a dog and not their children.

not all people who consider themselves "religious" do bad things

I agree. I do, however, maintain that religious belief is an inherently bad thing and that it is, by definition, a warning sign that OTHER conclusions are most likely to also be complete nonsense.

(You're new! Hi, welcome in, I'm John. If I haven't already, I'm likely to offend you eventually, just so you know)

[ardys-the-ghoul.livejournal.com]

I usually try very hard to see both sides of the situation, even if I disagree with one of them (or both of them, as the case may be). I'm not offended yet, but I'm open to being offended in the future, as long as you don't totally discount my perspective (all I ask is that my perspective be considered--no one has to agree with it--because I probably thought about it a lot before coming to a conclusion).

I think I found your page because I was looking at a friend's friends list.

I disagree that religious belief is an inherently bad thing, but I don't want to argue about it, because I think your opinion is perfectly valid even if I don't entirely agree with it.

I was brought up in a Roman Catholic household, although I am not a Catholic ("lapsed Catholic" depending on who you talk to), because I don't agree with the Church's teachings--and on some level, yes, I think it's irrational to believe the Church. I hesitate to condemn religion completely (on an individual basis, because it means something different to everybody--organized religion is another thing entirely) if only because my mother is a "religious" person (irrational, certainly, but not crazy--she grew up with it and she doesn't know how else to think) and I respect her opinion on other points ("respect" doesn't mean "agree with").